A Scrying Shame (8 page)

“I can’t believe she’s dead. She looks  like one of those golden girls. You know the type. Like Barbie two-point-oh. It’s weird to think of her as just . . . gone.”

“Well, I’m here to tell you she’s not gone. Part of her is alive and well and currently stuck inside my head.”

“Maybe that’s the difference, then,” Chandra said. “She’s got unresolved issues. Isn’t that the deal with ghosts? She’s haunting you.”

Arie shook her head. “This isn’t a ghost, or at least it’s not like any ghost I’ve ever heard of.”

“The important part is that her death is unresolved. What is she showing you?”

“It’s all jumbled up. It was a red fog this time. And I had this feeling of being lost or trying to find something. She did, I mean.”

“Marissa,” Chandra whispered.

“And there were hands at my throat. They were choking me. I can’t even . . . I could feel her dying, and it felt like it was me.”

Arie could feel her throat close as the memory grew more vivid.

“Who was it?” Chandra whispered.

Tears welled in Arie’s eyes. “I don’t
know
. I can’t see his face. I’ve tried and tried, but . . .” A deep, shuddering sob twisted through her body.

Chandra reached over and held Arie’s hand. “It’s okay. You’re doing good. How about the hands? What did they look like?”

Arie pressed her fingers to her forehead and forced herself to stay calm. “I don’t know. But I don’t remember seeing anything distinctive. No scars or tattoos or anything. At the time, I couldn’t really think. It was . . . this feeling that I was about to die.

“You have to understand. When it’s happening, it’s like I’m them. It’s not like a movie. I’m not watching. It feels like it’s actually happening to me.”

Chandra squeezed Arie’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s take a break. I think we should get something to eat.”

“I can’t eat.”

“You have to try,” Chandra said. “You need to keep your strength up. And—I don’t know—you need to keep doing normal things.”

As if to prove Chandra right, the visions receded a bit while they ate their meal. Arie still felt them, though. They lurked at the edge of her awareness as if waiting to pounce the moment she dropped her guard.

After supper, Arie was able to tell Chandra about some of the other elements of Marissa’s death vision—the wedding ring, the diary and papers, the trailer.

Chandra was suitably grossed out by the image of the cockroaches scattering from under the medicine cabinet mirror. “That is so creepy.”

“The whole thing is creepy. And I know I’m not remembering everything. It’s hard. I can’t separate myself from her when it’s going on. I can’t concentrate. I know I’m forgetting things. Did I even tell you about the weird angel chorus?”

“You’re kidding, right?
Angels?
”

“Well,
something
keeps chanting the word ‘holy’ over and over again. And then this other voice, really loud and booming, says something about the blood calling to him. You know . . . like in the Bible?”

“That’s your department, preacher kid, not mine.”

“Genesis. Cain kills Abel and God finds out when Abel’s blood calls to Him from the ground and, like, tattles, I guess. Then God curses Cain and so on.  Don’t tell me you never heard that one before.”

“Well, yeah,” Chandra said. “But I didn’t know about blood calling or whatever. So does this mean God’s talking to you or something?”

“I don’t know.” Tears welled in Arie’s eyes. “I don’t want God to talk to me. I’m freaked out enough as it is.”

“Okay, I can’t help you with the God thing.
Way
above my pay grade, but as far as forgetting things, why don’t you try writing it down the next time?”

Chandra jumped up and rummaged through her bookshelf. She came back with a half-used spiral notebook and handed it to Arie.

It was a good idea. Arie set it by her purse, then retreated to the bathroom to wash her face and put on one of Chandra’s oversized sleeping T-shirts. Time for bed.

Arie overslept. Worse, the assault of visions continued, and it showed. She didn’t even have time to head back to Grumpa’s house for a change of clothes. No makeup either, so she ended up using Chandra’s. Her friend favored dark and dramatic. Not Arie’s best look.

The more she thought about Chandra’s theory that Marissa Mason had unresolved issues, the more anxious she grew. It felt right, but she didn’t know what that meant for her. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

Grady put them right back to work on the carpet. Guts was coming by to check on the job that afternoon, and they would need to evaluate how extensively the flooring had been contaminated. That meant pulling up the plywood underlayment, and that couldn’t happen until the carpet was dealt with.

“How are we going to do this?” Arie asked.

The Mason condo was the top floor of a five-story unit. Arie couldn’t imagine how they would navigate the flights of stairs with a sodden, blood-soaked roll of carpet without contaminating their path every step of the way. She was exhausted even thinking about it.

Grady’s answer didn’t sound any better.

“We’re going to cut it into strips, roll them up, and bag ‘em. It’ll be a lot more trips back and forth—”

“You mean up and down, don’t you?” Arie was still thinking about those five flights of stairs. Using the unit’s only elevator was out of the question. The condo’s homeowners association was already upset at sharing the tiny elevator with “janitors of death” in their banana-yellow spacesuits and crates of cleaning supplies. The residents had voiced numerous complaints—and that had been before they’d started hauling out bright red biohazard bags filled with the gory realities of violent death. The HOA president owned several area bars, and Guts wanted to work out a contract for whenever the inevitable bar fights broke out and involved blood. Guts was determined to keep her happy.

“The whole thing?” Arie stared at the thirty-four-by-twenty-foot expanse of lush wool Berber carpet.

“Nah,” Grady said. “Just the blood site. We’ll have to take an extra five feet or so of what looks uncontaminated to make sure the blood didn’t travel. You’d be surprised. But my guess is it didn’t flow side to side.” He shook his head ominously.

“You think it went . . .”

Grady jabbed his finger at the floor. “Down. My guess is it soaked into the floor trusses. We’ll see. If it did, we can only do so much. That’s why Guts is coming over. It’s his call.”

They got to work. Cutting through the backing of the carpet proved incredibly difficult. The razors in their utility knives dulled quickly. Arie was afraid she was going to cut off a finger. She could imagine Grady bitching at her for recontaminating the area. The only good thing was that, although they had to wear their biohazard suits—they did on almost every job—and rubber gloves, they didn’t have to wear face masks. Nevertheless, Arie was sweating like a pig within the first twenty minutes.

They heard the condo’s front door open.

“Dammit,” Grady said. “Guts is early. He said he wouldn’t be here ’til this afternoon. Go head him off, and tell him to come back after lunch.”

Arie trudged off down the hall, happy to have a break, but wondering how Guts was going to react being told to go away and come back later.

She rounded the corner and almost ran smack into the amazing-blue-eyes-nice-butt, winky guy.

“Holy crap,” he said.

Apparently he’d never seen a life-size ambulatory banana before.

Up close, the guy was even more gorgeous than she’d remembered. Coal black hair, those startling—and now startled—delft-blue eyes, and the hint of dark stubble that made a man in a business suit look rugged and sexy as hell.

“Who are you?” Arie managed to ask.

“No, the question is: Who are
you
?”

He sounded pissed, but Arie thought that was probably because she’d scared the hell out of him. Men didn’t take well to bananas leaping out of dark hallways.

Recognition crept into his eyes. “That was you in the red Focus the other day, wasn’t it?”

“Uh huh. I was late for work. I’m a cleanup tech,” Arie said.
Duh. Like he couldn’t figure that out.

She scrambled to regain her composure. “I don’t think anybody is supposed to be here. This is a crime scene.”

She almost gasped at the brilliance of his smile. Unfortunately, it vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

“I’m aware this is a crime scene. In fact, it’s
my
crime scene. I’m Detective Connor O’Shea.”

“Oh.” Arie’s mind, not at its best today anyway, went utterly blank.

They stared at each other. O’Shea’s eyes dipped, scanning Arie from her scraped-back-from-her-head-into-a-ponytail hair to her blue-booties-over-yellow-suit feet. Her heart skipped around a little until she remembered he was a cop. They had a tendency to look people over.

And she was blocking the hallway leading to his crime scene.

He raised a sooty eyebrow, waiting for her to figure out she needed to move aside.

“Oh,” she said again. She stepped back against the wall, rattling the painting next to her head in its frame.

He slid past, but as he did, she could have sworn he stole another quick peek at the “girls,” which jutted out like two cantaloupes. Arie’s body flooded with heat.
Damn it.
She was blushing. She snatched up two trash bags and fled to the van.

Arie would have stayed away until she was certain that he had left, but she knew Grady would pitch a fit. As she tossed the bags in the back of the van, she remembered the wedding dress. She’d set it aside as Grady had suggested, but she didn’t know if he’d told Guts or not.

When she returned to the apartment, Detective O’Shea stood in the living room. He had a small notebook out and was jotting something down.

“Can you tell me your name, please?”

“My name?” Arie squeaked.

O’Shea glanced up from his notes, and his lips tilted up slightly on one side. He closed the notebook and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Just trying to be friendly.”

“Oh,” Arie said.
Good lord, couldn’t she think of any other word?
Fortunately, she remembered the dress. She was even able to sound reasonably coherent when she described what she’d found and why she’d set it aside.

O’Shea was already nodding by the time she’d finished telling him about the footprint. “Thanks, we know about it. The dress snagged on the coroner’s gurney when they were wheeling her out. One of the guys stepped on it. It’s not evidence.”

Arie resumed feeling stupid. The reprieve had been far too brief.

“And you still haven’t told me your name.”

“Arie.” Since he was a cop, she added, “Like the initials—R.E.”

“What do the initials stand for?”

“You’d have to shoot me first.”

This time, he let the smile go, and it spread across his face like the sun. “I’d hate for it to come to that.”

Grady ruined the moment by walking into the living room.

“Listen, while you guys were cleaning, did you come across anything like a journal or a diary? Appointment book? Anything like that?” O’Shea asked.

Grady shook his head no, but Arie stiffened at the mention of a diary.

Flash.

Red leather. A tiny silver lock. The smell of bleach fills her nostrils.

It was a mere moment, but the detective’s eyes locked on hers. They weren’t smiling anymore.

“I don’t know where it is,” Arie said.

“But you’ve seen something like that? Which was it?” O’Shea’s tone was crisp and professional. He pulled the notebook back out.

“No. Of course not. I don’t . . . . no.”

O’Shea stared at Arie, his pencil still poised on the notepad. She stared back.

Grady laughed. “Dude, you are so weird.” Turning to O’Shea, he said, “This is only like her third day. She’s still freaked out. You should’ve seen her yesterday. Barfed all over the bathroom, and I’d just sanitized it.”

O’Shea didn’t look convinced, but he slowly put his notebook away. His eyes slid back and forth between Grady and Arie.

When the blue orbs landed back on Grady, Arie’s coworker shook his head ruefully. “Newbies.”

“Yeah,” O’Shea said. “Newbies.”

Guts showed up as expected right after lunch. He and Grady yanked up the bloodstained, four-by-eight sheet of plywood and then sprawled out on their stomachs to peer into the hole. The flashlight beams darted about while they examined the floor trusses. Arie hung back, trying to stay out of the way. The strobe-like effect of the flashing light bothered her. When the doorbell rang, they all jumped.

“Hey, get that,” Guts said. “If it’s reporters, send them away. In fact, send anybody else away. We can’t have people traipsing around in here with a hole in the floor. Some jackass will fall in and sue me.”

“It’s been three weeks,” Grady said. “It’s not going to be reporters.”

“Oh, yeah? It’s not like it’s been solved or anything. The cops have had this place completely sealed off, so now’s the time for them to sneak in. I’ve seen it before. Plus, this chick was kinda famous.”

The two went back to examining the trusses while Arie went to the front of the apartment. She opened the door to a middle-aged woman almost as height-deprived as herself. To compensate, the woman had piled her hair into a complicated topknot that wobbled whenever she moved her head. Behind her stood a tall, heavily made-up blonde in her late teens. Despite her youth, she’d acquired a pouty look that seemed permanent. Something about the girl made Arie’s skin prickle into goose bumps.

A reflection from the woman’s glasses caught Arie’s eye, and a faint sibilant hiss whispered . . .
So lossst.

“Oh, my gosh.” The woman gasped. Her eyes rounded in astonishment. At first, Arie thought she’d heard the whisper, too, but she realized the woman was merely reacting to the banana suit.

“The super said I would find someone here, but when no one answered, I thought maybe he was lying. I don’t know what I would have done. If I don’t get back to these people—”

“Can I help you?” Arie said.

“I hope so, if you’ll just let us in. We have permission.”